Courtyard of the Roots restaurant in Gaza
This is but one of the many pictures that reveal the truth about conditions in Gaza. Plus a video that reveals even more in the effort to provide supplies to Gaza
The Truth of the matter is in the trucks delivering goods and Israel providing services to the people of Gaza in spite of Hamas’s efforts to lie about it. Read on!
Fancy restaurants and Olympic-size pools: What the media won’t report about Gaza
By Tom Gross a former Middle East correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and the New York Daily News.
In recent days, the international media, particularly in Europe and the Mideast, has been full of stories about “activist boats sailing to Gaza carrying desperately-needed humanitarian aid and building materials.”
The BBC World Service even led its world news broadcasts with this story at one point over the weekend. (The BBC yesterday boasted that its global news audience has now risen to 220 million persons a week, making it by far the biggest news broadcaster in the world.)
Indeed the BBC and other prominent Western media regularly lead their viewers and readers astray with accounts of a non-existent “mass humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza.
What they won’t tell you about are the fancy new restaurants and swimming pools of Gaza, or about the wind surfing competitions on Gaza beaches, or the Strip’s crowded shops and markets. Many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza live a middle class (and in some cases an upper class) lifestyle that western journalists refuse to report on because it doesn’t fit with the simplistic story they were sent to write.
Here, courtesy of the Palestinian Ma’an news agency, is a report on Gaza’s new Olympic-sized swimming pool . (Most Israeli towns don’t have Olympic-size swimming pools. One wonders how an area that claims to be starved of water and building materials and depends on humanitarian aid builds an Olympic size swimming pool and creates a luxury lifestyle for some while others are forced to live in abject poverty as political pawn refugees?)
If you pop into the Roots Club in Gaza, according to the Lonely Planet guidebook, you can “dine on steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu”.
This report taken from Tom Gross Media
* While prominent Western media continue to lead their viewers and readers astray with accounts of a non-existent “mass humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza, fancy restaurants (video below) and an Olympic-size swimming pool open there
* Most Israeli towns don’t have Olympic-size swimming pools
* Many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza live a middle class (and in some cases an upper class) lifestyle that Western journalists refuse to report on because it doesn’t fit with the simplistic story they were sent to write
* If you drop into the Roots Club in Gaza, according to the Lonely Planet guidebook, you can “dine on steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu” (video, photos below)
* UN-run summer camp for Palestinian children burned to the ground for being “un-Islamic”; UN staff there threatened with murder; UN Security Council fails to react
* It is quite something when the president of a country (Shimon Peres) sees the need to criticize a foreign newspaper, such are the depths that The Guardian sunk to yesterday
A Palestinian newspaper photo (May 18, 2010) shows Gazan children in the newly built Olympic-sized swimming pool which opened earlier this month, despite continuing claims by some Western journalists and NGOs that there are no building materials and a severe shortage of water in Gaza.
markets in Gaza
markets 2 in Gaza
markets 3 Gaza
Above Recent photos from one of Gaza’s fruit and vegetable markets, from a cake shop, and from a children’s toy store in Gaza city. Hardly the “World War II-era concentration camp” that some Western journalists have claimed Gaza resembles.
